Holly Garrett

How to succeed on TikTok – A guide for businesses

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Two phones on a white bed showing both the TikTok logo and it's profile page. It is marketing the app.

Launched in September 2016, TikTok has quickly gained a massive following with approximately 30 million daily users. What originally started as an app for lip syncing popular songs and creating viral dances has turned into something so much bigger. Now TikTok is a create place for businesses to promote their services and products due to the app’s ad spaces, collaborations with popular creators, and ever-growing trends. Thanks to this app, a lot of smaller businesses have received clicks to their site and sold products due to customer reviews on the popular app. A great promotion place for companies of all sizes.

Company branding

When people visit your profile, you want to ensure that it is on brand. Match your theme and style to your website so you are instantly recognisable. First up, is your profile picture. A great idea for this is to use your company logo. This may need some slight redesigning as the TikTok profile picture, much like many other social media platforms is a circle. Therefore, if your website logo is rectangular, this should be edited to fit the shape so your who logo or name is on show.

Next up, is your bio. For this, you may have a company slogan. However, if you don’t we recommend you write a brief sentence or two about your company – the services or products that they offer – within about 80 characters in order to keep it short and sweet. Underneath your bio, there is also a space where you can add a link. For this, you could link your home page as the landing page. There is also another space where you can link your other social medias profiles – which will increase your engagement across all platforms.

Create the correct content

While still maintaining your company branding, you want to ensure that the content that you create is interesting and fun in order to maintain users’ attention, receive more likes and comments, and gain more of a following. A great way to do this is to ensure that your videos are not solely ads or in an ad format.  Make videos trying out your products or showing the services that you offer – possibly working with popular content creators who already have a following to promote your brand. For example, if you’re a makeup company, send PR packages to content creators who will review your products in videos.

Another top tip for creating videos is to make them enticing. Add TikTok’s text feature and ensure that it is bright, colourful, and has a good tagline that will draw in users to continue watching your video. Another popular feature is the text-to-speech, which reads out your text in an AI voice, immediately grabbing user;s attention due to its popularity.

Keep up with current trends

An easy way to get your videos onto people’s ‘For You Page’ is to follow what is trending. On the sound selection, there is a section that features the most popular songs. It is a great idea to keep up with these as user’s feeds can show videos with a certain sound due to them watching and liking other’s videos with that sound or using it themselves.

If you want to use filters on your videos, like Ryan Air and Duolingo – two of the most followed companies on TikTok – this is another way to reach user’s feeds as, much like the sounds, videos with their favourite or most watched filters will continue to pop up as they scroll.

Finally, it is also a good idea to keep up with popular hashtags. We recommend you create your own tags, so users can reach you easily, as well as adding related hashtags to your business. It is also suggested to include well-used hashtags based on the current trend you are participating in or what is trending on the FYP.

Engineering Manufacturing Technician Career Paths

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Male engineer in hard hat pointing

Are you looking to become an engineering manufacturing technician apprentice or currently in a training programme? If you answered yes to either of these, then it’s great to plan ahead and start looking at possible careers for your next steps. In this blog, we go through our top 3 career paths for engineers after their apprenticeship.

Costing engineer

As it says in the job role title, this career is focussed of the cost of working. Before working on a job, the costing engineer prices up the job based on the work that needs doing, tools required, and an approximate time that it would take to complete this job. This role is highly important, so the engineers know what they’re working with. They keep track of the project and ensure that the tools and project remain within the budget and is cost effective for the task they are completing.

Costing engineering is a great role to go into. You have high stakes in how engineering products go ahead by collecting data, analytics, proposals, and specifications for the engineer’s work and create templates for how the work will be competed, analysing the job again at the end to make sure that the budget was well kept, and everything went according to plan.

The required skills to become a costing engineer are good communication, negotiation, and influencing skills in order to work with the client to get what they want and the price you require. You also need to have good analysis skills, project management, and be good financially, knowing what prices things so nothing is over or under charged. Finally, you also need to be able to interpret technical data and be able to translate that to the other workers in your team, alongside the client.

With all of these, you’re on the path to becoming a costing engineer.

Production support engineer

Within this role, you are responsible for a lot of the faults or troubleshooting errors that may occur before or during jobs. They respond to any requests sent in my clients to ensure everything on there is up to scratch and ready for the engineers to go in and work on the job at hand. Once these errors have been found, they talk to the engineers about the issue, so they know for the current job and the future, as well as recording them on the system so these any faults that occur, don’t occur again or as regularly in the future. With these problems found, they work to find solutions or improvements that could be used – planning, designing, and testing their ideas. Production support engineers play a huge role in engineering, always having a job to do.

In order to become a production support engineer, you need to ensure that you have the required skills in order to do the job effectively and safely. These are problem solving in order to always find the correct solution that will take place of the fault and work safely. You also need to ensure that your customer service skills are highly trained so you can communicate with clients, receive feedback, and do all this in a professional and polite manner. Finally, you need to have a trained eye with a lot of attention to detail and technical expertise, so any errors or faults are resolved in a high-quality and timely manner.

Highly skilled, organised, confident, and calm? Maybe the production support engineer role is for you.

Process engineer

The role of a process engineer is very important in the engineering world. As a process engineer, you transform raw materials into everyday product by designing, implementing, controlling, and optimising the manufacturing process. Whilst doing this, you also ensure that the role that you are doing is time efficient, in order to get tasks done and tested before the job. You also have to ensure that you are cost effective, so you are not over exceeding the budget required. On top of all of this, you also work to ensure that what you do produce coincides with the health and safety standards.

This job, much like all engineering jobs, have a certain set of skills that are required in order to work effectively. These include problem solving. When something goes wrong while designing or creating, you have to ensure that you can figure out what the problem is and how it can be resolved in a timely matter to ensure all materials are ready when necessary. This also requires critical thinking. You also need to ensure that you have a good attention to detail so your products are to the highest standard possible, matching or exceeding the company standard for better customer reviews.

With these, you could be a process engineer after your apprenticeship.